Musical Mondays: Oscar Hammerstein
there was life before Rodgers
We’ve been enjoying Musical Mondays for sixteen months and, because musical theatre is an infinite box of delights, have barely touched upon some of the greats. Only in the past few weeks have we spent enough time on Lorenz Hart, from which it is appropriate to acknowledge that we haven’t spent enough time on Oscar Hammerstein (the Second). So now is the moment. Overture!
An overture is a slightly eccentric way to introduce a lyricist, of course. But this is a good moment to re-tell the probably apocryphal but always entertaining story of the party in which the observation that Jerome Kern wrote ‘Ol’ Man River’ was countered by Mrs Oscar Hammerstein, who pointedly clarified that Kern wrote ‘dum dum da-da’; her husband wrote ‘Ol’ Man River.’
Had Hammerstein died in December 1926 he would have been remembered as a talented footnote in a fertile and transitional era on Broadway who “never got to grips with the Jazz Age.”1 (To be fair to him, he would only have been 31. Regular readers who will expect him to have been a New York Jew can be mildly surprised; he was born to a family of Jewish heritage, but attended a Universalist - i.e. a heretical - church.
Following a footnote on Wikipedia led me to this: The liberal Protestant influence on the musical plays of Oscar Hammerstein II circa 1943-1959, a doctoral thesis in the Divinity School (!) at the University of St Andrews. As is familiar from my own doctoral work, this seems less an original contribution to scholarship than a Mildly Interesting Idea to be discussed over port and cigars).
The creative fertility of the 1920s musical encompassed Follies (and indeed follies); P.G. Wodehouse; shows that were really compendia of ‘turns’ or ‘spots;’ Shuffle Along and other ‘black shows,’ for want of a better term; a lot of cookie-cutter nonsense about rich people in disguise that occasionally included great songs; and operetta. One stream that fed the musical-theatre river was light opera and the biggest fish in this stream was Sigmund Romberg. Whilst Rodgers and Hart were busily scattering genius over Broadway in the 1920s, their prodigious output was matched by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern but beaten by Romberg.
Another Crown Prince of Operetta was Rudolf Friml, with whom Hammerstein wrote his biggest hit to that point, the 1924 show Rose-Marie that would be, chronologically, his first entry in Bloom & Vlastnik’s 101 Greatest. Friml was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is remembered in Tom Lehrer’s ‘Wiener Schnitzel Waltz’ (“your lips were like wine, if you’ll pardon the simile / the music was lovely and quite Rudolf Friml-y”).
Hammerstein was not yet the Hammerstein he would become. Most of what is remembered from Rose-Marie (besides the RCMP costumes) is ‘Indian Love Call,’ and of that only one phoneme:
“When I’m calling yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooou”
Hammerstein continued in gainful if forgettable employment (Sunny with Kern and Wildflower with Vincent Youmans) before his next smash, The Desert Song in 1926, with music by the great Romberg. “These [operetta] shows may have stilted dialogue and lyrics by today’s standards,” note Bloom & Vlastnik, “but the emotions are deeply-felt and emphatically richer than those in today’s musicals.” Contemporary theatre is both steeped in irony and thoroughly didactic, a toxic combination.
[Sidenote: if nothing else, Sunny includes the lyric “dreams I know can never come true / seems as though I’ll ever be blue,” which is good enough for anyone].
Desert Song may still be performed by your local Operatic Society, especially if they have a store of exotic costumes, but it’s unlikely that one might take one’s LP of Desert Song and, like Man in Chair from Drowsy Chaperone, thereby chase away the blues. (Part of the reason why so many ‘20s shows are relatively unknown, of course, is because cast recordings were very rare indeed). Could you name a number from Desert Song? Not even -
“In the night or early morning, you know,
if you're the ‘red shadow’s’ foe,
the riffs will strike with a blow,
that brings you woe.
Ho!”
No no no.
Even so, row on row hollered ‘ho!’ for the show.
There we go.
Fortunately for everybody, Hammerstein’s book and lyrics for his Broadway premiere of December 1927 were a considerable improvement. Not only were the words superior, but the show itself is generally regarded as a watershed in the history of musical theatre. Everything is either Before or After Show Boat.
Show Boat, in short, was far more of a dramatic narrative than previously; characters had at least two-and-a-half dimensions; there were difficult decisions and elements of tragedy; there was, given that the cast was more racially-integrated than the audience, social commentary. “With Show Boat, Hammerstein made himself… the first dramatist of the American musical.”2
We’ve looked at ‘Ol’ Man River’ before, but let’s take another moment to admire Hammerstein’s courage:
“He don' plant taters,
He don' plant cotton,
An' dem dat plants 'em
Is soon forgotten,
But Ol' Man River,
He jes' keeps rollin' along”
Lorenz Hart wouldn’t and probably couldn’t have written ‘Ol’ Man River.’ He would have rhymed it with flivver, as per Ira Gershwin. Hammerstein has the courage to let the words simply land, to carry the character (and the symbolic weight); the absence of lyrical genius is the genius.3
Hart might have written
“Can you see
The why or wherefore
I should be
The one you care for?”4
But Hammerstein, writing lyrics for his own book, knew that this has a faint air of unreality within the plot, as though operetta had turned up when it wasn’t wanted.
The second-most famous song from the show is ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine.’ It might seem old hat to us, or might even strike some peculiar people as a form of white privilege, but the fact that Julie is singing a song that did not - umm - originate amongst her particular demographic was a significant cultural moment. And the lyric, to Kern’s languorous tune, is an expression of joyful helplessness:
“Fish got to swim, birds got to fly,
I got to love one man till I die -
Can't help lovin' dat man of mine.
Tell me he's lazy, tell me he's slow,
Tell me I'm crazy (maybe I know) -
Can't help lovin' dat man of mine”
In ‘Life Upon the Wicked Stage,’ Hammerstein seems to be kicking back and revealing an unexpected loungey side.
“Why do stage struck maidens clamor
To be actin' in the drammer?”
You won’t find that in a rhyming dictionary but it’s natural and apt.
“We've heard say
You are gay
Night and day”
Stop it. This was 1927, years before the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (suggested motto: Tomorrow’s Homosexuals, Today).
“Life upon the wicked stage
Ain't ever what a girl supposes;
Stage door Johnnies aren't rag-
Ing over you with gems and roses”
As I have said many times, acting is a job that other people are excited you do.
But old habits die hard, and Kern was delighted to interpolate a song that Wodehouse had written several years previously and which had never quite been used in a show. So it came to pass that ‘Bill,’ one of the most celebrated songs from Show Boat, wasn’t actually written by Oscar Hammerstein.
And then, because eras rarely begin and end so neatly, Hammerstein’s hit of 1928 was back to Romberg and operetta. Bloom & Vlastnik assert that The New Moon gave us six standards, which I’m frankly struggling to identify… ‘Lover, Come Back To Me’ certainly and, in terms of popular recognition, ‘Stout-hearted Men’:
“Give me some men who are stout-hearted men
Who will fight for the right they adore
Start me with ten who are stout-hearted men
And I'll soon give you ten thousand more”
The rest of the lyrics aren’t much of an advance on Desert Song. It’s Romberg’s stirring march that’s doing the work here. Do you recall ‘Tavern Song’? No, not that tavern song - you’re thinking of Student Prince of Heidelberg, another Romberg paean to documentary realism.5 As the great Michael Green wrote, you see what happens when you go into a pub and declaim “what ho, my merry lads!”
[Foreshadowing: ‘Lover, Come Back To Me’ contains the refrain : “this heart of mine is singing,” a tic which in years to come Alan Jay Lerner would call ‘the anthropomorphic heart’ and identify as evidence for Hammerstein’s deficiencies as a lyricist].
The New Moon was set in the French colony of New Orleans during the historical period when New Orleans was a Spanish colony, but hey - nobody looks to musical theatre for historical accuracy. The West was not won by a load of lithe men in plaid shirts who did complicated dance routines.
More importantly, “Hammerstein had set new standards for musical theatre and then spent the next 16 years conspicuously failing to live up to them.”6 The advances of Anything Goes, Of Thee I Sing and The Boys from Syracuse lit up Broadway whilst Hammerstein wrote Rainbow, Sweet Adeline, The Gang’s All Here, Free For All, East Wind, May Wine, Music in the Air, Very Warm for May and Sunny River, most of which stayed around just about long enough to apologise for the intrusion. (And are so forgettable not even Wikipedia can be bothered to list them). Only Very Warm for May, his final show with Kern, is remembered and that for ‘All The Things You Are.’ It contains an enharmonic stage, which is most unusual, and some of Hammerstein’s most effective lyrics. It’s difficult to write a new expression of affection in musical theatre, but
“You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long”
is unbeatable.
I was never quite sure why an evening should tremble on the brink of a song, lovely or otherwise, and Hammerstein himself was never terribly happy with
“Some day my happy arms will hold you
And some day I'll know that moment divine
When all the things you are, are mine”
‘Moment divine’ is a little precious, but can be forgiven in the context of a beautiful song.
Had Hammerstein died in December 1940 he would have been remembered as a fine librettist and lyricist who produced consistently good work, speckled with moments of greatness, and whose contribution to Show Boat marked a paradigm shift in musical theatre.
He didn’t die. Lorenz Hart, however, was increasingly unwell.
Steyn, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight
ibid
Hat-tip to Jerome Kern, obviously, for writing dum dum da-da.
Naturally Hammerstein knew, as you know, that why and wherefore mean the same thing.
Lyrics not by Hammerstein but by Dorothy Donnelly. You may well ask…
Steyn again. The space he gives to Show Boat indicates its significance.